Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 44(3), 238–257 Summer 2008 Published online in Wiley Interscience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/jhbs.20313 © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. SCIENCE AND CULTURE AROUND THE MONTESSORI’S FIRST “CHILDREN’S HOUSES” IN ROME (1907–1915) RENATO FOSCHI Between 1907 and 1908, Maria Montessori’s (1870–1952) educational method was elaborated at the Children’s Houses of the San Lorenzo district in Rome. This pioneering experience was the basis for the international fame that came to Montessori after the publication of her 1909 volume dedicated to her “Method.” The “Montessori Method” was considered by some to be scientific, liberal, and revolutionary. The present article focuses upon the complex contexts of the method’s elaboration. It shows how the Children’s Houses developed in relation to a particular scientific and cultural eclecticism. It describes the factors that both favored and hindered the method’s elaboration, by paying attention to the complex network of social, institutional, and scientific relationships revolving around the figure of Maria Montessori. A number of “contradictory” dimensions of Montessori’s experience are also examined with a view to helping to revise her myth and offering the image of a scholar who was a real early-twentieth-century prototype of a “multiple” behavioral scientist. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. INTRODUCTION Maria Montessori’s (1870–1952) famous book on “Method” (1909, 1912) is considered a classic text in the history of the behavioral sciences. However, an understanding of the nature of the ideas involved in the book on “Method” requires careful consideration of the multifaceted (political, religious, and scientific) contexts in which these ideas developed. In order to understand the complex contexts out of which Montessori’s scientific pedagogy originated, it is necessary to emphasize that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, pedagogy and child psychology were not simply a product of experimental analysis. Rather, the aim of taking research from the laboratory to the real world led to the development of knowledge in an applied behavioral context (cf. Ash, 2006; Danziger, 1990; Hale, 1980; Jansz & Drunen, 2004). An historical analysis of this development, however, is difficult because the multiple relevant aspects of the context vary widely with changing historical periods. In 1909, at the beginning of her book on “Method,” Montessori made reference to psychology and anthropology as the sources of her new scientific pedagogy, elaborated on the basis of the educational experiments that she had carried out at the “Children’s Houses,” founded in Rome in January 1907: Much has been said in the past decade concerning the tendency of pedagogy, following the footsteps of medicine, to pass beyond the purely speculative stage and base its conclusions on the positive results of experimentation. Physiological and experimental psychology which, from Weber and Fechner to Wundt, has become organized into a new science, seems destined to furnish to the new pedagogy that fundamental preparation which the old-time metaphysical psychology furnished to philosophical pedagogy. Morphological anthropology applied to the physical study of children, is also a strong element in the growth of the new pedagogy. (Montessori, 1909/1912, p. 1) The idea that scientific pedagogy was a field of application developing from physical anthropology and experimental psychology legitimized Montessori’s pedagogical work. RENATO FOSCHI, Psy.D. and Ph.D., is a Contract Researcher and Professor at the University “La Sapienza” of Rome. 238 MONTESSORI’S FIRST “CHILDREN’S HOUSES” IN ROME 239 However, she adopted this point of view of the “positive” sciences in a critical way; in fact, her aim was to elaborate a new learning psychology that was based on observing the potentialities in the development of children and that was critical of abstract empirical and philosophical research. The central point of Montessori’s “Method” was essentially to use educational material scaled to the level of the child to educate the senses in a natural manner without constraint or coercion. For this reason, Maria Montessori adapted the techniques of Jean Itard (1774–1838) and Edouard Seguin (1812–1880)—both of whom are widely cited in the volume of 1909. Essential to Montessori’s method was also the systematic adaptation of materials derived from the psychology laboratory and from physical anthropology for practical use, rather than research. In the same line, Montessori believed that the teacher had to possess a real understanding of the experimental approach and therefore required training in experimental psychology and physical anthropology, and that the child must be seen as an active participant in the educational process. Indeed, psychology and anthropology were introduced by law into the courses of the Italian Pedagogical Schools—the national schools for teachers—in 1905 (Regio Decreto 19 January 1905, n. 29). Moreover, between 1905 and 1907, Maria Montessori took part in several public debates promoting the social utility of a new scientific pedagogy based on psychology and anthropology. In doing this she exposed herself to the criticism of both the Italian academic and Catholic pedagogical traditions. The former pursued an abstract and passive idea of the child, while the latter was more interested in a pedagogy that aimed at indoctrination and the development of morality (Trabalzini, 2003; cf. Montessori, 1992/1916). These critics are addressed in greater detail later in this paper. In order to provide a context for this analysis, I first describe Maria Montessori’s own educational, political, and religious background, drawing important points in this exposition from original archival research conducted in the Historical Archives of the Bank of Italy, Archives of the Museum of Didactics of Rome, Generalate Archive of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, Archive of the Grand Orient of Italy, and Francesco Randone’s private Archive. BEFORE THE CHILDREN’S HOUSES Montessori was born into a middle-class family in 1870, in Chiaravalle, in the central Italian province of Ancona. Her father, Alessandro Montessori (1832–1915), was a public clerk with liberal and anticlerical ideas; her mother, Renilde Stoppani (1840–1912), belonged to the moderate middle class and was the niece of Antonio Stoppani (1824– 1891), a rather eclectic character, a liberal priest, a naturalist, and a politician. The year of Montessori’s birth was also the year of Italian unification, in which Rome was adopted as the capital city. When Montessori was a young child, the family moved to Rome, where the father took a position in a newly established ministry. As a result, Montessori grew up and studied Rome. In in 1890, she enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Rome “La Sapienza.” In this respect, as a woman, she was a pioneer. During her higher studies in Rome, she established a series of relationships with scholars renowned for their serious political and progressive commitment to the conception that social prophylaxis of illness was a duty for a science founded on positivist principles. Among her professors were Angelo Celli (1857–1914), a representative of the liberal left and professor of “experimental hygiene,” and Clodomiro Bonfigli (1838–1919), a professor at the Psychiatric Clinic. JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs 240 RENATO FOSCHI During Montessori’s early years at the University, a number of other individuals had a significant influence on her. She studied physiology under Jacob Moleschott (1822–1893), a physiologist and a senator, who was a professor in Turin, before moving to the University of Rome “La Sapienza” (on Moleschott cf. Cosmacini, 2005). In addition, Guido Baccelli (1832–1916)—a progressive, Masonic doctor frequently appointed Secretary of Education and founder of the main university hospital in Rome (Policlinic Umberto I)—provided constant support when Montessori suffered a variety of professional and academic vicissitudes. Although Maria Montessori was not the first Italian woman to get a degree in medicine, as erroneously reported by Maccheroni (1947), she began her medical career in 1890 and received the M.D. degree in 1896 with the dissertation “Contributo clinico allo studio delle allucinazioni a contenuto antagonistico” [A clinical contribution to the study of the delusion of persecution], written with the support of Sante De Sanctis (1862–1935), a pioneer in Italian experimental and developmental psychology (on the importance of De Sanctis for the history of Italian Psychology, see Cimino & Lombardo, 2004). She also collaborated with Ezio Sciamanna (1850–1905), the official supervisor of Montessori’s medical dissertation, a Roman academic, and a neuropathologist influenced by the Salpêtrière school. Moreover, De Sanctis and Montessori, in that period, collaborated in editing reviews for the first Italian journal that made explicit reference to psychology, Rivista quindicinale di psicologia, psichiatria e neuropatologia [Fortnightly magazine of psychology, psychiatry, and neuropathology], directed by Sciamanna and Giuseppe Sergi (1841–1936), professor of anthropology and psychology at the University of Rome “La Sapienza.” Sergi, a Sicilian supporter of Garibaldi and an evolutionist with proto-socialist ideas, was one of a number of important teachers of Montessori, who, despite their own progressive ideas, nonetheless considered women—as well as the child, the criminal, the prostitute, the fool, and the poor—to be evolutionarily inferior. From this point of view, they looked for scientific evidence of this assumed inferiority with the double aim of limiting the potential damage that these “involute individuals” could cause to society and, from a “progressive” point of view, rehabilitating the individual and regenerating his progeny (Babini & Lama, 2000; Cives, 2000; cf. Kramer, 1976/1988, pp. 68–71). Not surprisingly, this theoretical position went side by side with an ambiguous attitude toward the child; children were considered human beings at an inferior evolutionary stage that, in order to develop in an “orthodox way,” needed adult care. This point of view favored the establishment of a series of pedagogical and psychiatric initiatives aimed at the scientific study of the child to rehabilitate those who were born with some deficit or were less able to emancipate from their natural stage of evolutionary inferiority (Alatri, 2001; Babini, 1996; Guarnieri, 2001, 2006). After completing her M.D., Montessori began work in public medical clinics in Rome. At the same time, she also entered the public sphere as a proponent of policies of the rising Italian feminist movement, especially those having to do with psychological science. Her political commitment, between 1896 and 1908, strongly conditioned her professional career: She became involved in many national and international initiatives, helping to found female associations, participating in conferences, and publishing in the female periodical press. This led to an important contradiction in Montessori’s ideas. When she operated in a scientific context, she tended to write as though she was a supporter of ideas like Sergi’s. When she wrote in a political context, however, she was an ardent liberal and feminist. Side by side with her political engagement, Maria Montessori’s professional career continued to develop. Between 1898 and 1901, she took part in the first two Italian conferences on pedagogy—in Turin and Naples (actually, for political reasons, the Neapolitan conference never took place, but its proceedings were still published)—with two reports on feebleminded JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs MONTESSORI’S FIRST “CHILDREN’S HOUSES” IN ROME 241 children, one on classification and the other on special teaching. Both attracted a great interest among Italian scholars (Babini, 1996; Catarsi, 1995). In 1899, the Lega Nazionale per la Protezione dei Deficienti [National League for Care and Education of Mentally Deficient Children] was founded in Rome by Bonfigli, with the help of Baccelli; the Lega promoted special schooling for feebleminded children. Montessori became one of the central figures in this “League,” making an important educational trip to Paris in order to observe French work on children’s mental hygiene. In Paris, she came into contact with Désiré-Magloire Bourneville (1840–1909) and was attracted to the French medical–psychological tradition that took its inspiration from the ideas of Itard and Seguin. It was during her work with the League that she developed a particularly close relationship with Giuseppe Montesano (1868–1951); in 1898 she and Montesano had a child together. In 1901, Montesano, also a pupil of Sciamanna and Sergi, married another woman. The child was put to nurse outside Rome and, until the death of Montessori’s mother, Renilde, he was kept at a distance from his mother’s care (Babini & Lama, 2000; Trabalzini, 2003). One additional fact in Montessori’s development was a peculiar liberal and Masonic conception of science and education very close to a secular political line. These views came to Montessori through the influence of colleagues who either were Masons (e.g., Baccelli, Bourneville) or whose ideas where consistent with those of Masonry (e.g., Moleschott, Sergi). In particular, Ernesto Nathan (1845–1921), Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy and mayor of Rome (1907–1909), became a central supporter of Montessori’s method and of the Children’s Houses. Although the help that the Grand Orient of Italy gave to Maria Montessori was not systematic, but indirect, it provided a network of support that encompassed several scholars who drew their inspiration from the liberal progressivism of Masonry (on the relationship between Masonry, psychology, and progressive education, cf. Foschi & Cicciola, 2006, 2007; Tomasi, 1980). Indeed, on May 23, 1899, Maria Montessori joined a para-Masonic society that accepted women as members: the Theosophical Society, inspired by Madame Blavatsky (1831–1891) and directed in this period by Annie Besant (1847–1933). The Theosophical Society was an esoteric organization based on a rationalist religiousness with a strong impulse toward social action and infant education, a secret organization in which women played a managing role. Until late in her life, Montessori remained associated with the international theosophical movement (Wilson, 1985). It was as a theosophist that Montessori establish a certain friendship with Francesco Randone (1864–1935), a sculptor and founder of a school for educational art whose theories and methods were widely represented in the first edition of the Method (de Feo, 2001, 2005; Wilson, 1985; cf. Montessori, 1909/2000, pp. 328–330). In 1902, after a definitive separation from Montesano and from the League, Maria Montessori went through a new stage in her career. She enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” where she attended the philosophical lectures of Antonio Labriola (1843–1904), a pedagogue and a Marxist philosopher; the psychological lectures of De Sanctis; and the pedagogical course of Luigi Credaro (1860–1939), a progressive and Masonic pedagogue who was also Secretary of Education. At the same time, still with the support of Baccelli and Sergi, she started teaching anthropology at the pedagogical schools for the training of teachers, which had been instituted at the Faculty of Education (Facoltà di Magistero), with the support of Credaro; Montessori continued to teach anthropology to the primary school teachers at the University of Rome until 1910 (Montessori, 1907, 1910). In these years, it was mainly Sergi who convinced her to learn physical anthropology, a discipline in which she qualified as a university teacher in 1904. In order to prepare for the JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs 242 RENATO FOSCHI competition to qualify as a university teacher in physical anthropology (Libera docenza)—a discipline in which she had no publications—Montessori carried out research on women and children in the Italian province of Lazio (Montessori, 1905b, 1903/1997, 1910). Like Alfred Binet (1857–1911), Montessori gathered several craniometrical measures of primary school children in order to understand to what extent the measure of the cranium was related to valuations of intellectual development. She also compared the anthropometric data to the biological and social status of the family (house, diet, parents’ working position). To explain the fact that teachers considered the children who belonged to the higher classes to be more intelligent, Montessori argued that cranial bulk was determined by social conditions (Montessori, 1904a, 1904b). In addition, her anthropological research took inspiration from Léonce Manouvrier (1850–1927), who became known because he proposed measures of female craniums that, once correlated to the whole body, were supposed to show the superiority of the female brain with respect to the male (Hecht, 1997). In this regard, Manouvrier’s anthropology was an alternative to that of Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) in that it was characterized by the conviction that anthropometric measures could not be considered a sign of degeneration or immorality; these measures should be considered independent of pathology and, on the contrary, that antisocial tendencies are rather a consequence of the environment in which the individual lives. Montessori’s anthropology, in other words, emerged as a science placed between the traditional classificatory and descriptive demands of education and the hygienic and social demands that characterized the cultural and political context in which she had grown up (Montessori, 1905b, 1907, 1910). Her views were, in effect, between those of Sergi and Manouvrier. On the one hand, she stated that delinquency was a hereditary factor and degenerative; on the other, she promoted a supposed female superiority and argued that it was necessary “not to condemn the criminal but to redeem him through education and by sharing with him the common fault, which is a scientific form of forgiveness” (Montessori, 1903, p. 331; cf. Babini, 2000, 2006; Blanckeart, 2001; Gould, 1981; Hecht, 1997). At the beginning of the twentieth century, Maria Montessori had thus distanced herself from child psychiatry and had moved toward alternative anthropological, psychological, and pedagogical approaches in accordance with a multidisciplinary view close to that of Sergi. An important expression of Montessori’s progressive scientific standpoint are the articles that she published in the liberal and radical journal La Vita [Life], whose organizers were Montessori’s friends Olga Lodi and her husband Luigi (on Luigi and Olga Lodi, see Cordova, 1999, 2005). In these articles for La Vita Maria Montessori supported a progressive reform of juvenile justice trusting to the reeducation of antisocial individuals on the basis of a militant science inspired by the “new” anthropology and psychology (Montessori, 1906a, 1906b, 1906c, 1906d, 1906e, 1906f; cf. Montessori, 1905a). The period around the foundation of the first Children’s Houses was also characterized by Montessori’s engagement in a number of important Italian political events. These included debates over both women’s right to the vote and the secularization of primary school education, which, among other things, involved doing away with the teaching of religion. In 1905 Maria Montessori was one of the founders of the female association “Pensiero e Azione” [Thought and Action], an organization principally aimed at promoting women’s voting rights (Società Femminile Pensiero e Azione, 1906). Strongly committed to this aim, Montessori endorsed the society’s programs and proclamations and signed its posters, then being put up in the streets of Rome. One of the most significant steps taken by Pensiero e Azione was the support given to Francisco Ferrer (1859–1909), a Mason and an anarchist, who, in 1906, had been arrested for the first time for the organization of a pedagogical movement—Escuela JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs MONTESSORI’S FIRST “CHILDREN’S HOUSES” IN ROME 243 Moderna—that spread in Europe and in the United States and that promoted a secular and libertarian education; the persecution of the conservative Spanish government led to Ferrer’s execution in 1909 with protests of libertarians all around the word (Babini & Lama, 2000, p. 176; on Francisco Ferrer, see Galzerano, 1993; Iurlano, 2000; Romaniello, 2000). In 1907, in spite of feminist activism, the Italian parliament rejected a petition which was supported by female associations and was based on a favorable interpretation of the Italian Constitution, whose aim was the inclusion of women in the electoral lists with the same criteria granted to men (Italian women got the voting right only at the end of the Second World War). This period was a sort of watershed in the history of the Italian feminist movement; it marked the beginning of a crisis about which a well-known feminist historian has written that the 1907 parliamentary defeat was followed by a substantial narrowing of the political horizon as shown by the first national Conference of Italian women held in Rome in May 1908. It is necessary to underline that, against all the re-appraisals of current affair journalism, the Roman Conference showed, in the first place, the right’s capability to neutralize, by absorbing them in order to cancel their fundamental lines, all the aspirations created in the progressive environment. (Pieroni Bortolotti, 1974, p. 112) Not surprisingly, the 1908 conference had Montessori as one of its most active participants. In 1908, a further significant event occurred: the parliament’s rejection of the “Bissolati’s motion” for the suppression of the teaching of Catholic religion in the Italian schools. Italian Masonry divided itself on this point; in fact, the Masonic members of parliament who had voted against Bissolati’s motion founded a new national Masonic organization that was an alternative to the Grand Orient of Italy, which was considered too politicized (Conti, 2003). This event led to a breach within both the liberal left and the feminist movement, where different positions concerning secular education emerged (cf. Consiglio Nazionale delle Donne Italiane, 1912). In short, in 1907 and 1908, Montessori was actively involved in significant political and institutional events: creating proclamations, signing political posters, publishing militant articles arguing for women’s voting rights and for new methods in the administration of social problems. After the women’s conference of 1908 and the disillusionment accompanying the rejection of the suffragist petition in 1907 and of the Bissolati motion, she returned, as we will see, to a cautious policy of mediation between secular and Catholic cultures (Babini & Lama, 2000, p. 196) In general, this period in Italy was thus characterized by the rejection of policies promoting a modernization and secularization of the state. It was also characterized by a renewed interest of the Catholic forces in politics, returning as Catholics did to the polls after an absence of more than thirty years, which had begun with the loss of papal temporal power and imposition of an explicit papal prohibition [the so-called Non Expedit (1874)] following Italian unification (on Montessori’s university career and biography, see also Babini & Lama, 2000; Catarsi, 1995; Direzione Generale Istruzione Superiore, n.d.; Kramer, 1976/1988; Maccheroni, 1947; Matellicani, 2000–2001; Università “La Sapienza” di Roma, n.d.; Standing, 1957/1984; Trabalzini, 2003; on Montessori’s bibliography, see Tornar, 2001). THE CHILDREN’S HOUSES By 1906–1907, Montessori was thus well known to the liberal and radical Roman elites as a pedagogical expert. It was in this role that Eduardo Talamo (1858–1916), a civil engineer as well as the general manager of the Roman Institute of Real Estate (IRBS), a close friend of the JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs 244 RENATO FOSCHI Lodi family, called her to direct the educational activities of the Children’s Houses of the IRBS. And it was at the Children’s Houses that the “Montessori Method” began to be developed. On January 6, the first IRBS Children’s House was opened in Rome, at 58 Marsi Street, in the slum-ridden San Lorenzo district. Here Montessori worked for the first time with “normal” children belonging to the lower classes. Over the next six years, several more Children’s Houses were opened in Rome. The IRBS had been created at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the real estate of the Bank of Italy, by the shareholders of the bank itself and by its first director, Bonaldo Stringher (1854–1930), who was a close friend of Nathan and a convinced supporter of progressive and secular finance (Gigliobianco, 2006, p. 111; cf. Foschi, 2007). Talamo was Marquis of Castelnuovo Cilento, a village south of Salerno. He had studied at the Polytechnic of Zürich and had also become a senator of the liberal left, while his brother Roberto had been a vice prime minister in the government presided over by Giuseppe Zanardelli (1826–1903), an early twentieth-century Masonic government that was characterized by the attempt to promote a secular modernization of the country (Della Valle, 1916). The IRBS, a society founded in Rome in 1904 by hundreds of thousands of shareholders of the Bank of Italy, was designed as an independent agency to manage the real estate that the Bank had taken over in bankruptcy proceedings following a financial crisis in the building industry resulting from post-unity years of inflation (Neri, 2002; Protasi, 2002). Once it was entrusted to Talamo, the IRBS was involved in the restoration of working-class neighborhoods and the construction of wide areas of some of Rome’s main districts (Istituto Romano di Beni Stabili, 1905). Talamo promoted an intense campaign for the modernization of the buildings that was aimed at making them brighter and more hygienic. He also wanted to space them out and to increase their number in order to reduce illegal sublets—which were favored by the construction of too large apartments—and at the same time to augment IRBS revenues by increasing the number of rentable apartments (on the IRBS and the San Lorenzo district, cf. Pazzaglini, 1989; Sanfilippo, 2003). Talamo also aimed at offering a number of amenities to the inhabitants of IRBS apartments. These included gardens, toilets, wash-houses, ambulatories, and, above all, preschools for children between ages three and seven that were called, as suggested by Olga Lodi, “Case dei Bambini” [Children’s Houses]. Under the guidance of Talamo, the Children’s Houses were designed to be incorporated into IRBS model residences. A reading of the annual report of the IRBS’s shareholders shows that between 1905 and 1908, the Institute’s profits increased by 375 percent (Istituto Romano di Beni Stabili, 1905, 1907a); it was a remarkable increase that was determined not only by the establishment of the Children’s Houses but by the engineering ideas of Talamo, who had conceived a plan of restoration with different blocks of flats designed according to the needs of the target users (working class, middle class, and affluent). Each block of flats was to have different types of utilities according to the families’ working hours and salaries. Children’s Houses, he thought, had to be present in both the lower- and middle-class lodgings, but not in those designed for the upper class, since they could enjoy such large apartments that they did not require the presence of any common space for the education of the children. In addition, Talamo felt that the education of the people should start from the education of the children belonging to the poorest families (Talamo, 1910; cf. Talamo, 1911a, 1911b, 1914); this was something that the Children’s Houses could accomplish. To reward families that stood out from others in caring for their flats and in participating in the activities promoted by the Children’s Houses, Talamo even established a civil celebration in the San Lorenzo district during which the “best” families were given a discount on JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs MONTESSORI’S FIRST “CHILDREN’S HOUSES” IN ROME 245 the price of the monthly rent. This approach was initially quite successful and, between January 1907 and 1908, four Children’s Houses for the children of lower-class families were founded in San Lorenzo (Talamo, 1910, pp. 16–17). In November 1908, the IRBS also set up a Children’s House in the Prati district for the children of middle-class families. Its functioning, however, proved to be less successful than that of the Children’s Houses in San Lorenzo. As Talamo described the situation in Prati: the Children’s House, which was soon successful in the popular district of San Lorenzo, has been, on the contrary, always seen [in Prati] with a certain diffidence. Not many families sent their children there during the first few months; we started our activities with 15 children who became 33 in May and reached the number of 50 last December. The number of the absences was impressive: it increased by 130% while in San Lorenzo it was limited to 38%. This is explainable: for those in the lower class, the Children’s House immediately became a real necessity not only for the children but for the adults as well: the latter having found in it the best way to dedicate themselves to their work by putting aside worries about their children, the former love it because they are surrounded all day by a joyful comfort that they can not find in their houses. Hence, their affection for this institution from which both the children and the adults try to get the greatest possible advantage. . . . The middle classes is not interested at all in this. (Talamo, 1910, p. 24) The “experiments” were then addressed above all to the working classes and represented a real effort to favor the socialization and the development of morality of their tenants—so that the less affluent classes were granted the same amenities easily enjoyed by the richer classes (garden, wash-house, nursery school, ambulatory)—and, at the same time, to preserve and to invest the goods of the IRBS (p. 12). The further goal was thus to create housing where the families could learn how to take care of themselves and of the places in which they lived and, as a consequence, make the IRBS more profitable (cf. Foschi, 2007). The foundational idea of the Children’s House as an organization that favored the development of morality of the tenants strongly marked the experiment of Talamo, who invited Stringher to attend the opening of the first House in Marsi Street with the following still unpublished letter: I do not dare to tell you to come to the opening of the first Children’s House that we will hold tomorrow in San Lorenzo because it is a modest thing. Nevertheless, I feel bound to send to you the program of this institution because I am sure that it is a subject of some interest for you, as everything concerning this institute that owes its existence to You. (Talamo, 1907) The “Program of the Children’s House” was enclosed with the letter; it was a sort of catalogue of precise rules that the families had to comply with in order to have the opportunity to send their children to the Children’s Houses. The rules obliged the families to send their children to school neat and well dressed, to respect the headmistress and the house personnel, to assist the headmistress in the educational activities. The “unkempt and filthy” children, the “undisciplined” ones, the ones whose families showed a “disrespectful attitude” to the personnel working in the House, or those whose bad behavior “in one way or another, hindered the educator’s work that is the purpose of the institution” would have been expelled. Moreover, the annual reward to be conferred to the most disciplined tenants considered the way in which the parents assisted “the work of the headmistress for the education of their children” (Istituto Romano di Beni Stabili, 1907b; cf. Talamo, 1910). From January 6, 1907, on, the IRBS tried to endow most of its blocks with Children’s Houses; but some time in 1908 Montessori and Talamo came into conflict and in 1909 their collaboration ended. This may have reflected the fact that, starting in 1908, Montessori was JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs 246 RENATO FOSCHI invited to open Children’s Houses in Milan for the housing project of the cooperative “Umanitaria” [Humanitarian Society], a secular, socialist, and Masonic organization that was a “business unit” competing against the IRBS (cf. Istituto Romano di Beni Stabili, 1905, p. 543). In this regard Talamo wrote that “the idea itself of the Children’s House . . . , just because it was simple in its conception and accomplishment, gave some relevant and exceptional fruits . . . and obtained the most eloquent praise from its imitation by some noble institutions, such as the ‘Umanitaria’ from Milan” (Talamo, 1910, p. 14; on the Humanitarian Society, see Pruneri, 2004; Società Umanitaria, 1921, 1922, 1964). Conflict with Talamo may also have come about because of Montessori’s independence and initiative. She was interested in developing an innovative pedagogical method that was acknowledged by the scientific community, while Talamo was motivated by the interests of his shareholders, combined with humanitarian ideals and his civil engineering approach. Later, each of them founded his/her own Children’s Houses and, gradually, the term “Children’s Houses” came to be used generically in Italy to indicate a place for modern and vanguard education, even for those not directly associated to the IRBS or to Maria Montessori. After the break with Talamo, Montessori no longer wished to have her method adopted by the Children’s Houses of the IRBS. In a letter of that period addressed to Olga Lodi—a letter that has recently been published with an incorrect attribution and that, after comparing the sender’s signature and address to those of some other letters placed in the archives of the Bank of Italy, we can surely attribute to Talamo—we can read: Dear Ms Olga . . . I’m at odds with Montessori; she writes to me and refuses my proposals by initiating a quarrel (?) and threatening to block her method in our schools. It seems to me that she is on the wrong track and very ill advised. As for her threat, let her do what she wants; she will have much more to lose when people say that the IRBS has banned her methods in the Children’s Houses; although I do not know how the methods can be withdrawn when they sell the teaching tools to the Umanitaria which gives the inventor 20% of the price. It would be as if a person who publishes a book of history or grammar that is regularly sold in a bookshop claimed that those who want to study it have to do so only through the teachings of the author himself, otherwise they are not allowed to do it. Maria Montessori’s case is even worse because when I tell her: “You can just teach: I will take care of the disciplinary aspects of the school,” she answers: “you can not divide the teaching from the disciplinary part of it.” Then I protest, leave and we start quarreling. Angry people usually get angrier and angrier, even worse when they get big-headed: even Our Lord could not stop them. After this long chat I again wish you all the best. (Talamo, n.d.; cf. Cordova, 1999, pp. 430–431) Montessori later remembered in an interview that after the breach with the IRBS she was even forbidden to enter the Children’s Houses of San Lorenzo; she was stopped at the entrance by the guardians (Kramer, 1976/1988, p. 146). In 1913, in the newspaper La Tribuna, Talamo remarked that the children’s houses were a IRBS creation: Montessori’s method and the Children’s House are two separate entities. The former is a genial achievement that is rightly awarded a great honor and that is concerned exclusively with infant education; on the contrary, the Children’s House, i.e. a school within the house, was actually and substantially created by the IRBS that wanted to establish it in its housing projects just because it plays a prominent part, as element of civilization of the people, in the modern transformation of the house and, as Your reliable newspaper rightly observes, it deals directly with the most important aspect of the social question, that is the intimate lives of men. Montessori method and the Children’s House have just one thing in common: as suggested by a gentle lady to whom I had sought advice, rather than adopting, as far the pedagogical side was concerned, the usual methods JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs MONTESSORI’S FIRST “CHILDREN’S HOUSES” IN ROME 247 adopted in that period in the Nursery Schools, I decided to experiment on a large scale with the excellent methods of the eminent Professor Montessori. (Talamo, 1913) After the break with Talamo, Montessori carried on her research by herself; she wrote her famous volume on the “method as applied to child education in the children’s houses” and started training teachers to apply it. The Talamo–Montessori experiment proved to be successful and launched Montessori’s method (Montessori, 1909, 1909/2000). A “Committee for the Spreading of Dr. Montessori’s Educational Method” was also established in Rome; it included among its members a number of liberal politicians, such as Nathan, some intellectuals, and some female elites who met in the Capitol’s halls and acted under the sponsorship of the Queen Mother (cf. Comitato promotore per la diffusione del metodo educativo della dottoressa Montessori, 1912). The Catholic liberal barons Franchetti were members of the committee (on the barons Franchetti, see Pezzino & Tacchini, 2002); they hosted Maria Montessori at their estate, “La Montesca,” in Umbria, the place where the first training course for Italian teachers on Montessori’s new scientific pedagogy was held and where she wrote most of her treatise on her Method. Indeed, the volume was dedicated to the memory of Alice Hallgarten Franchetti (1874–1911) who had been engaged in Rome, in San Lorenzo, with a number of humanitarian educational activities of Christian and interconfessional inspiration (Montessori, 1909, 1909/2000, 1912; cf. Babini & Lama, 2000). With the help of the committee, additional Montessori Children’s Houses were opened in Rome; one of them was opened on the Pincio for the children of the ruling classes, while another was opened for the lower classes in a municipal school of the Jewish district, close to the Church of Saint Angelo in Pescheria. During this period, scholars from all over the world—among whom was Lightner Witmer (1867–1956), founder of the first American psychoeducational clinic and who, like Montessori, had drawn his inspiration from Seguin—came to Rome in order to observe this “prodigious” scientific pedagogy that was able to educate children and, at the same time, free the child’s mind (Kramer, 1976/1988, pp. 145–157; cf. Tozier, 1911; on Witmer, see McReynolds, 1997). FROM LIBERAL TO CATHOLIC SCIENCE Archival research shows that the end of Montessori’s collaboration with the IRBS marked the beginning of a new stage in her life and career, one that has received little attention from scholars. This stage was characterized by collaboration with Catholic circles, in particular with the Generalate of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary (FMM). It was at the main convent of this monastic order, located in Rome at 12 Giusti Street, that an important Children’s House was founded in 1910 and that the first international courses on the Method were held in 1913 (Anonymous, 1915; cf. Honegger Fresco, 1996). Founded by Hélène de Chappotin (1839–1904), in religion Mary of the Passion, the FMM advocated the social doctrine of the Catholic Church and was involved in several humanitarian causes; it is still today a congregation that pays great attention to the interconfessional and multicultural dialogue (Launay, 2003). Maria Montessori established a special relationship with this congregation and with the Superior of the Institute, Jeanne de Geslin de Bourgogne (1860–1917), Mary of the Redemption, a pupil of Hélène de Chappotin. The sources show that by 1910 Maria Montessori had already begun to reestablish her Catholic faith and had started, with her closer collaborators, a training course in Catholic doctrine at the FMM novices’ house in Grottaferrata—Mary Elisabeth of the Annunciation, alias Elisabeth de Grünne de Hemricourt (1876–1938) had been their catechist (cf. Godinot, 1985, p. 70). JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs 248 RENATO FOSCHI The relationship between Montessori and the Mother Superior of the FMM is attested to by a number of letters and archival documents that offer a further perspective on the human and scientific experience of the Italian scholar by showing how she, in this period, conceived her rising pedagogical movement as a sort of secret Catholic female pedagogical association (cf. Schwegman, 1999, pp. 98–99). In an unpublished booklet probably created by Montessori herself and collected at the Generalate Archive of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, we can find the “Rules” that the early Montessori’s teachers had to follow in this hypothetical congregation; in it we can read: Outwardly, there should not appear any sign of our real state: anyway, I firmly believe that we cannot serve two masters—and that those who join us have to get rid of their world, their family, their state, their activities and all their goods. . . . Therefore, you can imagine a secret religious congregation—where all its members are however absolutely detached from the world. Having said this—we ought to define the way to hide as much as we need in order to get to our purpose. . . . One of the presents we have received is just the vision of a practical pedagogical renewal: the harvest we have already reaped draws the world’s trust to it and calls for the foundation of a great center of studies. Then, it would be necessary not only to form mistresses but also the new science that the world is waiting for [underlined in text]. (Anonymous, 1910a, pp. 12–18; cf. Kramer, 1976/1988, p. 179) Moreover, the project of a religious and pedagogical congregation included a profession of Catholic faith and the moral and intellectual duties with which the teachers had to comply. This explains, as underlined by some biographers, why the early circle of pupils recalled strongly a sort of Last Supper gathered together under the protection of “Maria” (Kramer, 1976/1988, p. 179; cf. Cohen, 1969). Mary of the Redemption supervised both the pedagogical work and Maria Montessori’s religious development by drawing up a confidential dossier on the scholar. In this dossier, which is collected at the Generalate Archive of the FMM, we can find several documents, most of which can be dated to 1910–1911, from which a “mystic” interpretation of the Method and of the pedagogical aims emerges. Moreover, these documents testify to Montessori’s need “to rely” on Mary of the Redemption and on the FMM. The rules of the Children’s House in Giusti Street themselves included some disciplinary moments of prayer that were not present in the IRBS’s pedagogical rules; moreover, in those years, the nuns opened other Children’s Houses in their buildings in Milan and Taormina (Godinot, 1985; Honegger Fresco, 1996). For her part, the Mother Superior, Mary of the Redemption, was collecting some confidential information both on Montessori’s pedagogy and on the results of the religious development that Montessori herself and her closer collaborators were pursuing at the novices’ convent of Grottaferrata. The information was collected for the Mother Superior by Mother Mary Elisabeth of the Messiah, Elisabeth de Monge (1878–1945), the provincial vicar of the order: Dear Mother Superior . . . I give you an account of the talks I had with miss Fedeli . . . the “Children’s House” is just a little thing if compared to the aim miss Montessori wants to get to through this means. . . . Her main aim is that the children’s mistress should actually favor the adults (the pupils’ parents and the whole district), a reformer of ideas, a raising and moralizing element, an agent of truth [underlined in text]. (de Monge, n.d., August 9) In other letters, the same de Monge commented on the authenticity of the religiosity of Montessori and of her circle: JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs MONTESSORI’S FIRST “CHILDREN’S HOUSES” IN ROME 249 Dear Mother Superior, last time I forgot to tell you that Montessori . . . , at her residence, . . . is having a chapel built with a secret entrance so that a priest can go there to celebrate mass; this presence has to remain a secret, even from the servants. Montessori’s father opposes religion, her mother has become a religious person only after her daughter has done so. (de Monge, n.d., September 16; cf. de Monge, n.d., September 22) Mary of the Redemption was clearly interested in knowing Maria Montessori and her collaborators well. In the dossier she collected we can find a hand-copied article from the magazine Le Théosophe (October 1, 1911) entitled “Travaux et projects de la ligue pour l’ education morale de la jeunesse,” that deals with the project of the French theosophists to found an educational movement on the basis of the ideas and the Method of “their friend Montessori.” In this regard, in a letter of October 30, 1911, addressed to the Mother Superior, Montessori herself wrote: “. . . The theosophists possess the method: let the Catholic people possess it. It is necessary to fight, not to retire in the name of a prudence that is by now tardy” (Montessori, 1911). Unfortunately, the documents collected at the Generalate archive of the FMM also reveal the eventual failure of this sui generis attempt of regaining the Catholic faith. In particular, a scholarly journal article, which is stored in Montessori’s dossier, criticizes the collaboration between Montessori, the FMM, and Agostino Gemelli (1878–1959)—a psychologist, founder of the Catholic University of the Holy Heart, and an “expert” for the Catholic Church on scientific and psychological matters (on Gemelli, see Bocci, 2003)—in the following terms: We are saying that Father Gemelli wanted to illustrate the new method of teaching adopted by the FMM in the Children’s House that they have recently opened at 24, Solferino Street [in Milan]. By taking out as much as is good from Montessori’s method, the FMM have been able to carry out, in a few months, some new marvelous activities. They turned some children aged three to six into model, quiet, gracious and active children by leaving them absolutely free from any restriction. . . . “[G]o to the Children’s House, Father Gemelli said, and you will be aware of the marvelous truth of what I have said!” . . . Miss Montessori wants the children to be allowed to be completely free in all their actions and in the manifestation of their nature. . . . [But] what does this exaggerated cult of the independence and freedom that even refuses the reward for the good deed and the punishment for the evil ones, represent? [italics and bold in original text]. (Anonymous, 1912, pp. 171–174) Responding to the sharp criticism in this article, Gemelli wrote a worried letter to Mary of the Redemption saying that the article had been written against him, “against the nuns and against Montessori method” (Gemelli, 1912a). Within a few months, Gemelli’s view of Motessori and her Method had radically altered and he again wrote to Mary of the Redemption: Reverend Mother, I hasten to answer Your kind letter. I have written a very harsh and severe review—or rather, a short pamphlet—on Mrs. Montessori’s books. But because of my respect for You, Reverend Mother, and for Your words, and for what You have just mentioned, I am not going to publish it for now. . . . [U]nfortunately, last year one of my collaborators published a laudatory review of Montessori’s work. I did not know anything about her publications then and, as far as pedagogy was concerned, I relied upon this person. Unfortunately I was wrong. This year I decided to read Montessori’s books and I have been persuaded that these works, and in particular the pedagogical anthropology, are scientifically inadequate and, moreover, harmful to the people of faith. So, in one way or another—if Miss Montessori will not acknowledge spontaneously her mistakes—I will have to talk about it, in order to prevent them from doing harm. Anyway, I will wait for You, Reverend Mother, to tell me that I can do it without doing harm to the health of the soul of the mentioned lady [underlined in text]. (Gemelli, 1912b) JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs 250 RENATO FOSCHI This debate, stored in the FMM Generalate Archive, drew on and extended the criticism that, in 1910–1911, La Civiltà Cattolica [Catholic Civilization], the main propaganda organ of the Jesuits, had put forward against the Montessori Method. In particular, La Civiltà Cattolica did not approve the methodological reference to the “discipline founded on freedom,” “the abolition of rewards and punishments,” and the figure of the “observing” teacher who did not interfere directly with behavior. In one of the articles that the journal dedicated to the Montessori Method, we can read: All social life is obedience, submission to one’s duty, to the established familiar, civic, religious and political authorities. To represent a man as free from any obligation means to create his own unhappiness; the most autonomous men and women are the most unhappy adult people. (Anonymous, 1911, p. 200; cf. Anonymous, 1910b) So, after the end of her collaboration with the IRBS, in 1915 Montessori’s collaboration with the FMM too, came to an end and the Children’s House in Giusti Street was closed. This is the testimony of what happened in Montessori’s own words: Reverend Mother, in the hope that you have not completely rejected from Your generous heart the work that was entrusted to You with such great trust and devotion, I take the liberty, with my collaborators, of wishing You a Merry Christmas. When we knew about the closing of the Children’s House in Giusti Street, we felt mortally wounded! It was our place of support and the only public sign of public love and open approval of the Church. . . . Maybe God, after this last trial, that seems to have taken away from us any sign of support from the church—will finally reward us. We are working much more united than we did in the past. Dear Mother—I do not understand what happened—but still allow me to remember all the good I get from You! (Montessori, 1915) Paradoxically, it was also during this period that, in spite of the break with the FMM, Maria Montessori began to receive international acclaim. “When Maria Montessori arrived in America,” Rita Kramer writes, “at the end of 1913 she was at the height of her fame—indeed, one of the most famous women in the world . . . the most interesting woman in Europe. . . . A woman who revolutionized the educational system of the world. . . . An eager public was waiting for Montessori in America” (Kramer, 1976/1988, p. 15). Indeed, Montessori’s success in the United States was supported by a cultural elite that was similar to the Roman one—important figures of the American economic and cultural circles including, among others, Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) and Samuel Sidney McClure (1857–1949). The American newspapers described Montessori’s pedagogy as a new education that disciplined through freedom: “permitting each child to develop freely and without restraint, has a special appeal in this free-for-all country” (“Dr. Montessori in America,” 1913). CONCLUSIONS As Danziger (1990) has clearly pointed out, at the beginning of the twentieth century education became one of the predominant fields of psychology’s applications, a market where marketable methods could be sold. This may have been the latent element that aroused the interest of American public opinion in Montessori’s pedagogy; but, if so, it also had a negative effect on how the Montessori Method was received. American educational administrators were interested in methods whose costs and effectiveness could be measured so that methods could be compared and cost effective methods adopted. It was on just these points that the Montessori Method was criticized. Even during Montessori’s first trip to America, in 1913, influential voices suggested that her Method was not very original and was too expensive to JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs MONTESSORI’S FIRST “CHILDREN’S HOUSES” IN ROME 251 be used in kindergartens (“Dr. Montessori Will Not Be Able to Revolutionize School Methods,” 1913). But the major criticism came from the American mainstream of philosophy of education, in particular from William Heard Kilpatrick (1871–1965), an influential “pupil” of John Dewey (1859–1952). Kilpatrick proposed a limited version of Montessori’s pedagogy and criticized her methods by defining them as too mechanical, formal, and restricting. He wrote (1914): . . . that Madam Montessori’s doctrine of sense-training is based on an outworn and castoff psychological theory; that the didactic apparatus devised to carry this theory into effect is in so far worthless: that what little value remains to the apparatus could be better got from the sense-experience incidental to properly directed play with wisely chosen, but less expensive and more childlike, playthings. (pp. 27–29) Indeed, there was some justification in these criticisms in that the major authors quoted in the “Method” were Itard and Seguin, a heterogeneous group of psychologists, pedagogues, and psychophysicists (Baldwin, Fechner, Froebel, James, Preyer, Weber, Wundt), some of her professors of the University “La Sapienza”—in particular those with a progressive and positivist background (Baccelli, De Sanctis, Sergi)—and some “unknown” educators such as Randone and Talamo. Nowhere did Montessori furnish any data about the efficacy of her pedagogical method (cf. Montessori, 1909/2000; for a modern evaluation of the “Method,” see Lillard & Else-Quest, 2006). The criticism of the Italian academic philosophers of education was even more severe than those in America. They considered her Method the product of a superficial collection of marginal, dissimilar, juxtaposed, and obsolete sources and her pedagogical work at the Children’s Houses as banal and unscientific. In the conclusion of a famous examination of Montessori’s work at the Children’s Houses written by a powerful Roman academic of the time, we read: Believe me, dear lady: it is funnier to relate simply the chatters with the little tenants of the philanthropic Roman building institute rather than reading those cold German or English books, so packed with experimental figures and serious questions concerning those problems that you consider so simple. Do not envy us, poor Philosophical Doctors, our melancholy. On the contrary, as a good Medical Doctor, please return to anthropology, pediatrics, legal medicine, obstetrics, hygiene, . . . to culinary [italics in text]. (cf. Della Valle, 1911, p. 80) This influential criticism, coming from the mainstream of the Italian and international science of education, contributed to the relegation of Montessori’s Method to a position outside the academic mainstream (Kramer, 1976/1988, pp. 227–232; cf. Trabalzini, 2003). In reality, Montessori’s pedagogy was the fruit of a complex intersection of ideas and contexts that no historical contribution has so far presented in full. The feature of Montessori’s Method that most attracted the public of her time, arousing criticism from the most conservative sectors of her society and praise from the most progressive ones, was her attempt to put the child at the center of the educational process again and to free him from the role of a passive object of study and application. In a more general frame, the experiment of the Children’s Houses reproduced a typical aim of the early-twentieth-century human sciences: to contribute toward founding a new idea of individual freedom, legitimized by science and at the same time aimed at widening the sphere of people’s psychological power, disciplining masses, and normalizing the new emerging subjectivities—people’s children, the proletarians, the emigrants, the anarchists, the feminists, the socialists, etc.—in a historical period characterized by crisis and social change JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs 252 RENATO FOSCHI (cf. Rose, 1999, pp. 160–164). In this sense, people’s children and their families emerged as subject of the early Montessori’s scientific pedagogy. After all, the liberals of that period considered this pedagogy to represent a progressive and emancipatory perspective and, for this reason, the early-twentieth-century Italian and, in particular, Roman “elites” supported Maria Montessori. These elites emerged from a sort of collaboration between secular and Catholic women engaged with the progressive movement for women’s emancipation (Fossati, 1997; Gaiotti De Biase, 1963/2002). Unfortunately, the publication of a papal encyclical, Pascendi Dominici gregis (1907), which had given rise to a real “hunt” for those Catholics who collaborated, in an anti-dogmatic way, with the secular and the Protestant people, brought about a period of increasing persecution of those Italian intellectuals looking for a compromise between progressivism and Christian theology within a theoretical frame called Modernism (Bedeschi, 2000). These were the contexts and the relations surrounding Montessori between 1908 and 1913, when liberal Catholic circles at first welcomed her Method, only later to become hostile to it, when the creeping antimodernism allied itself with the most conservative and obscurantist elements of Italian society. Montessori moved carefully within this difficult social scene. Between 1910 and 1913, she preserved a cautious secular, positivist, and feminist public image—because she did not want to fall, like Ferrer, victim to it. In fact, until the 1920s, Maria Montessori made no public reference to her official approach to the Catholic Church; but we know that after the break with the IRBS she did in fact approach the Church. In 1918 she even received a blessing from Pope Benedict XV and then, between 1922 and 1932, she wrote three volumes explicitly dealing with the Christian education of the child (Montessori, 1922; cf. Montessori 1931, 1932; see also Trabalzini, 2003, pp. 87–88). During this period Montessori also created a complex network of support that helped do away with the cliché of the woman-scientist—the “slave” of the laboratory, the passive gatherer of empirical facts, or, worse, the “shadow assistant” of the “master university professor”—to make an international name for herself as the promoter of a new education founded on freedom and on children’s self-education (cf. Valentine, 2005). Yet at the same time, her desire to emerge at first as a leader of the feminist movement, and then as founder of a new modernizing and scientific pedagogical movement, exposed her to continuous criticism and judgment both in Italy and abroad. This analysis of sources reveals that Montessori undoubtedly attempted to pursue a middle ground between positivism and religion that seemed to favor a modernization of the educational sphere. But each of these “compromises” proved to be a failure and, at the end of her life, the only surviving and valid relationship was that between Montessori and theosophy (see Lama, 2002), a relationship that probably represented the most radical attempt of synthesizing positivism, female emancipation, modernization, and religious feeling (Wilson, 1985). In conclusion, the present article shows how Maria Montessori’s science, like that of contemporaries such as Alfred Binet, was a sort of “multiple science” that came out of the laboratory into the real world (cf. Foschi & Cicciola, 2006). This science can be fully understood only if we contextualize its creator by locating Montessori, through a “crossed historical analysis,” within the different matrices in which she operated. The simple analysis of the scientific sources of Montessori’s Method, the description and classification of Montessori’s learning techniques, the comparison with other pedagogical methods do not suffice in providing a deep understanding of the extraordinary complexity embodied by this scholar (for a similar historiographical perspective, cf. Carroy, 1993; Foschi, 2003; Foschi & Cicciola, 2006; Plas, 2000). JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs MONTESSORI’S FIRST “CHILDREN’S HOUSES” IN ROME 253 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The present article is an expansion of the poster Engineering a Free Mind: A Century from the First Montessori’s “Children’s House” in Rome (1907–2007), presented to Cheiron/ ESHHS Joint Meeting, June 25 to 29, 2007, at University College, Dublin, Ireland. The translation of the previously unpublished quotations has been entrusted to Dr. Felice De Cusatis. I would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of Giovanna Alatri of the Historical Museum of Didactics of Rome. I’m also very grateful to Sr. Chaterine Bazin, FMM, of Generalate Archive of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary (Rome); to Bernardino Fioravanti, director of the Library of the Grand Orient of Italy (GOI); to Giovanna Caterina de Feo of the Francesco Randone’s private Archive (Rome); to the Talamo family (Castelnvovo Cilento); to Guido Cimino, Patrizia Guarnieri, and Giovanni Pietro Lombardo, who supported my research. A special thanks to Robert H. Wozniak, who provided English and some editorial consultation on the final version of the paper. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Renato Foschi, Facoltà di Psicologia 1, Università “La Sapienza,” Via dei Marsi 78, 00185 Rome, Italy; e-mail: renato.foschi@uniroma1.it. REFERENCES Alatri, G. (2001). 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